North Dakota Wins; Idaho State Needs Offensive Answers

There were two Big Sky games on Thursday night, and the losing teams of the two games combined to score 85 points.

First, North Dakota took down Presentation College by the score of 74-32. Just a few stats, since gaudy numbers are to be expected in a game like this.

At the half, the score was  28-10, as Presentation was just 4/18 from the field. UND shot 55% from the floor for the game, led by Alonzo Traylor scoring 17 points on 8/8 shooting. Amazingly, there were only 13 fouls called in the game, and Presentation was 0/2 from the stripe. From that standpoint, that was about as clean of a game as you could get.

One area of concern for UND continues to be the turnovers of Jamal Webb. He committed six of them in this game, and the starting guard now averages 4.6 giveaways per game.

Now, the important thing.... who is Presentation College? Their nickname is the Saints, and they are now 4-6 on the year with losses to teams like Minnesota-Morris, Trinity Bible College, Valley City State, and Oglala Lakota College. It appears they compete in the D3 ranks. In other words, this probably won't do wonders for UND's RPI, but it is a win.

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In the other game of the night, Idaho State went to play Cal State Fullerton and lost by a score of 66-53. The loss drops them to 1-7 on the year.

As has been the case all year, their struggles were mostly with putting the ball in the basket. They shot 38%, including 4/14 from downtown. Tomas Sanchez was their only real threat, as he scored 17 points on 6/10 shooting. He also had five rebounds, three assists, and three steals.

Apart from Sanchez and Andre Hatchett, the rest of the team shot 7/27 from the floor. Starting PG Melvin Morgan was 1/9 from the floor, with one assist to three turnovers. Guard Chris Hansen was supposed to provide long-range shooting, but he is just 16/44 from downtown this year.  The team as a whole is shooting 27% from three-pointers on the young season. If they are going to be more than a bottom Big Sky team, that number has to improve.

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